Anna Moszynska shows here how abstract art originated and evolved, placing it in its broad historical and cultural context. She traces the paths to abstraction forged by artists such as Balla, Kupka and Delaunay, and examines the pioneering work of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, the Russian Constructivists, the De Stijl group and the Bauhaus artists, and contrasts the geometric tendencies of the 1930s and 1940s with the post-War emphasis on personal expression that culminated in Abstract Expressionism in the United States. Finally, Anna Moszynska considers the work of 'Post-Painterly', Op, Kinetic and Minimal artists and examines the revived abstraction practised by Neo-Geo and other artists of the 1980s.

With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman--many of which have never before been available in English--and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.

Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction offers a fresh and revealing assessment of the artist's prolific and innovative painterly career. The comprehensive exhibition and accompanying catalogue will feature approximately seventy paintings and works on paper by Hofmann from 1930 through the end of his life in 1966, including works from public and private collections across North America and Europe. Curator Lucinda Barnes builds on new scholarship published over the past ten years and the 2014 catalogue raisonne to present Hofmann as a unique synthesis of student, artist, teacher, and mentor who transcended generations and continents. His singular artistic achievement drew on artistic influences and innovations that spanned two world wars and transatlantic avant-gardes. Over the last fifty years Hofmann has come to be understood primarily from the vantage of his late color-plane abstractions. Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction expands our understanding and reinvigorates our appreciation of Hofmann through an inclusive presentation of his artistic arc, showing the vibrant interconnectedness and continuity in his work of European and American influences from the early twentieth century through the advent of abstract expressionism. Published in association with the Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Exhibition dates: Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): February 27-July 21, 2019 The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA: September 21, 2019-January 6, 2020

The publication explores the diversity of the lives and destinies of artists during the Weimar Republic, under National Socialism, and until the inaugural documenta held in the young Federal Republic in 1955. Their works and biographies bear witness to the horrors of persecution and careers cut short, to resistance and conformity. The presentation intertwines the individual lives with the parallel strands of contemporary history and institutional frameworks. Numerous authors shed light on issues that have recently attracted sustained interest from historians. The choice of emphases reflects the history of the Lenbachhaus's collection and exhibition program. The presentation accordingly focuses on the Munich art scene, complemented by major phenomena on the national and international stages. Diversity of biographies and topics of German art history between 1918 and 1955 With works by Otto Freundlich, Kathe Hoch, Rudolf Schlichter, Maria Luiko, George Grosz, Gabriele Munter, and others Exhibition Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau October 15, 2022-April 16, 2023

This publication sets the precedent for the next generation of Lawrence scholars and studies in modern and contemporary discourse. The American Struggle explores Jacob Lawrence's radical way of transforming history into art by looking at his thirty panel series of paintings, Struggle . . . from the History of the American People (1954-56). Essays by Steven Locke, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Austen Barron Bailly, and Lydia Gordon mark the historic reunion of this series-seen together in this exhibition for the first time since 1958. In entries on the panels, a multitude of voices responds to the episodes representing struggle from American history that Lawrence chose to activate in his series. The American Struggle reexamines Lawrence's lost narrative and its power for twenty-first century audiences by including contemporary art and artists. Derrick Adams, Bethany Collins, and Hank Willis Thomas invite us to reconsider history through themes of struggle in ways that resonate with Lawrence's artistic invention. Statements by these artists amplify how they and Lawrence view history not as distant period of the past but as an active imaginative space that is continuously questioned in the present tense and for future audiences.

Since the 2011 Arab Spring street art has been a vehicle for political discourse in the Middle East, and has generated much discussion in both the popular media and academia. Yet, this conversation has generalised street art and identified it as a singular form with identical styles and objectives throughout the region. Street art's purpose is, however, defined by the socio-cultural circumstances of its production. Middle Eastern artists thus adopt distinctive methods in creating their individual work and responding to their individual environments. Here, in this new book, Sabrina De Turk employs rigorous visual analysis to explore the diversity of Middle Eastern street art and uses case studies of countries as varied as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain and Oman to illustrate how geographic specifics impact upon its function and aesthetic. Her book will be of significant interest to scholars specialising in art from the Middle East and North Africa and those who bring an interdisciplinary perspective to Middle East studies.

Alexander Archipenko has been called the "Picasso of Sculpture," at the experimental forefront for bringing elements of cubism to bear on the sculptural form. But, in My Life with Alexander Archipenko, Frances Archipenko Gray, with whom the innovative Ukrainian artist shared the last eight years of his life, paints a rounded and deeply personal picture of the artist throughout these late years--some of his most productive despite relative critical neglect. Gray came to know Archipenko at the Archipenko School in Woodstock, New York. Despite a nearly fifty-year age difference, teacher and student developed a deep and lasting companionship that led to marriage in 1957. In the years that followed, as the art world shifted its interest away from modernism toward abstract expressionism, Archipenko's work fell from critical favor. Yet nothing could stop the self-confident and vodka-drinking iconoclast, and Archipenko not only continued to exhibit, but published a comprehensive survey of his work, Fifty Creative Years, in 1960. Throughout the early 1960s, the couple traveled extensively in Europe to promote the artist's work. Beginning in the 1960s, Archipenko was also increasingly plagued by problems with forgeries and fraudulent authentications of his work, and the book casts new light on his resulting volatile relationship with many dealers, museums, and collectors. Archipenko's work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions worldwide, but My Life with Alexander Archipenko presents for the first time the fascinating man behind the works and puts forward a compelling case for his continued importance.

Eschewing the traditional focus on object/viewer spatial relationships, Timothy Scott Barker's Time and the Digital stresses the role of the temporal in digital art and media. The connectivity of contemporary digital interfaces has not only expanded the relationships between once separate spaces but has increased the complexity of the temporal in nearly unimagined ways. Invoking the process philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, Barker strives for nothing less than a new philosophy of time in digital encounters, aesthetics, and interactivity.
Of interest to scholars in the fields of art and media theory and philosophy of technology, as well as new media artists, this study contributes to an understanding of the new temporal experiences emergent in our interactions with digital technologies.

This authoritative reference work examines literary and artistic responses to the war's upheavals across a wide range of media and genres, from poetry to pamphlets, sculpture to television documentary, and requiems to war reporting. Rather than looking at particular forms of artistic expression in isolation and focusing only on the war and inter-war period, the 27 essays collected in this volume approach artistic responses to the war from a wide variety of angles and, where appropriate, pursue their inquiry into the present day. In 6 sections, covering Literature, the Visual Arts, Music, Periodicals and Journalism, Film and Broadcasting, and Publishing and Material Culture, a wide range of original chapters from experts across literature and the arts examine what means and approaches were employed to respond to the shock of war as well as asking such key questions as how and why literary and artistic responses to the war have changed over time, and how far later works of art are responses not only to the war itself, but to earlier cultural production.

Diane Arbus was one of the greatest photographers of the last century. Her portraiture of freaks, circus performers, twins, nudists and others on the social margins connected with a wide public at a deep psychological level. Her suicide in New York in 1971 overshadowed the reception to her work. Her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a year later drew lines around the block. She was born into a Russian-Jewish family, the Nemerovs, who owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. They were family friends with the Avedons. Richard Avedon later championed Arbus's work. Avedon rose to greater and greater commercial success through the magazine world. Arbus died in a rent-protected apartment scrambling to earn her keep with odd teaching assignments. Lubow's biography begins at the moment Arbus quit the world of commercial photography to be an artist. She was uncompromising in that ambition. The book ends with her death. The entire narrative is a slow march towards that event.

L'oeuvre d'Henri Matisse (1869-1954) revele sa croyance eternelle dans le pouvoir des couleurs pures et des formes simples. Bien qu'il soit surtout reconnu pour sa peinture, Matisse s'est aussi illustre en dessin, en sculpture, en lithographie, dans l'art du vitrail ainsi que du collage, dont il a developpe sa propre technique de decoupage quand son grand age l'empechait de rester debout et de peindre. Matisse a la plupart du temps peint des sujets classiques: nus, portraits, paysage animes de silhouettes, scene orientales et vues interieures. Pourtant, son traitement des couleurs intenses et son dessin fluide lui conferent une place de maitre du XXe siecle. La palette de Matisse a particulierement enchante l'imagination moderne. Par son usage du bleu intense, du violet amethyste et du jaune d'oeuf dans toutes leurs nuances, il a libere son oeuvre des carcans d'une representation rigoureuse de la realite et a plutot cherche une "harmonie vitale", en prenant la musique comme source d'inspiration et figure de comparaison dans son travail. Des grands tableaux remplis de motifs aux portraits simples et tendres, ce livre presente l'immense richesse et l'intense creativite qui a caracterise la carriere de Matisse, en parcourant ses premieres oeuvres rattachees au mouvement fauviste jusqu'a ses derniers projets tels que Jazz et la chapelle du Rosaire, a Vence. A propos de la collection Chaque volume de la Basic Art Series de TASCHEN contient: une chronologique detaillee de la vie et de l'oeuvre de l'artiste qui rend compte de son importance culturelle et artistique une biographie concise une centaine d'illustrations couleur accompagnees de legendes explicatives

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cezanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

In Abstract Art Against Autonomy, Mark Cheetham provides a revolutionary account of abstraction in the visual arts since the decline of the formalist paradigms in the 1960s. He claims that abstract work remains a vital contributor to contemporary visual culture, but that it performs in a way that is different from its predecessors of the early and mid-twentieth century and cannot adequately be assessed without new models of understanding. Cheetham posits that abstraction has reacted to paradigms of purity with practices of impurity. By examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance and cure, Cheetham provides an opportunity to rethink paradigmatic genres - the monochrome and the mirror - and to link in new ways the work of artists whose work extends and complicates the tradition of abstract art, including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley, General Idea and Taras Polataiko.

Why was New York abstract expressionism so successful after World War II? To answer that question, Serge Guilbaut takes a controversial look at the complicated, intertwining relationship among art, politics, and ideology. He explores the changing New York and Paris art scenes of the Cold War period, the rejection by artists of political ideology, and the coopting by left-wing writers and politicians of the artistic revolt.

This book is dedicated to the great Georgian modern artist David Kakabadze (1889-1952). This book compares the importance of David Kakabadze's creative work against the background of world avant-garde art of the beginning of the 20th century. This book is of interest for art historians and other experts, studying Georgian and Soviet art/culture, modern art and, especially, abstract art.

In recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume, Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of modern and contemporary art. This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey. Placing "process art" within a larger historical context, Grant looks at the changing relations of the artist's labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist's role in modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor. Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and contemporary art reveals how artists' explicit engagement with the concept fits into a broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.

This book reconstructs the efforts of avant-garde artists, primarily Natal'ia Goncharova and her Muscovite colleagues, to reclaim Russia's 'Eastern' cultural heritage. Before the First World War, art addressed a crisis in self-representation that was a consequence of Russia's dual cultural legacies, Asian and European. This text represents Goncharova's leading role in this project, both as a spokesperson and a painter. The animated and often polarizing debates concerning the cultural identity of contemporary art were often preceded by Goncharova's practices that react to a critical tradition that, for at least a decade, had accused the radical 'left' Muscovite artists of failing to create a national tradition.

Insiders/Outsiders, published to accompany a UK-wide arts festival of the same name in 2019, examines the extraordinarily rich and pervasive contribution of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe to the visual culture, art education and art-world structures of the United Kingdom. In every field, emigres arriving from Europe in the 1930s - supported by a small number of like-minded individuals already resident in the UK - introduced a professionalism, internationalism and bold avant-gardism to a British art world not known for these attributes. At a time when the issue of immigration is much debated, the book serves as a reminder of the importance of cultural cross-fertilization and of the deep, long-lasting and wide-ranging contribution that refugees make to British life. Contributions by: Richard Aronowitz, Harriet Atkinson, Michael Berkowitz, Morwenna Blewett, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Charmian Brinson, Andrew Chandler, Hans Christian Hoenes, Leyla Daybelge, Rachel Dickson, Keith Holz, Amanda Hopkinson, Shauna Isaac, Swantje Kuhfuss-Wickenheiser, Simon Lake, Sarah MacDougall, Anna Muller-Harlin, Sir Norman Rosenthal, Anna Nyburg, Michael Paraskos, Antony Penrose, Alan Powers and Daniel Snowman

The Russian Revolution and Civil War - as never seen before! Packed with jaw-dropping, at times blood-curdling images, Russia Accursed! showcases the reaction of Ivan Vladmirov (1869-1947) to the human suffering and Bolshevik barbarity he observed as an artist-reporter during the years 1917-25. Some of his paintings and watercolours appeared in magazines and periodicals, including London weekly The Graphic (Vladimirov's mother was English). But other scenes - featuring point-blank executions, passers-by cutting chunks of meat from a dead horse or dogs gnawing at a human corpse - were deemed too shocking for publication and had to be secretly exported from the USSR by American relief workers. Selected from private collections, Russian museums and the Hoover Library at Stanford University, California, most of the 160 Vladimirov images in this majestic 324-page volume are published here for the first time. Placed in their historic context by scholarly essays, contemporary photographs and eye-witness quotes, they revolutionize our understanding of the beginnings of the Soviet Union.

Kurt Schwitters was a major protagonist in the histories of modern art and literature, whose response to the contradictions of modern life rivals that of Marcel Duchamp in its importance for artists working today. His celebrated Merz pictures--collaged and assembled from the scrap materials of popular culture and the debris of the studio, such as newspaper clippings, wood, cardboard, fabric, and paint--reflect a lifelong interest in collection, fragmentation, and abstraction, techniques he also applied to language and graphic design. As the first anthology in English of the critical and theoretical writings of this influential artist, Myself and My Aims makes the case for Schwitters as one of the most creative thinkers of his generation. Including material that has never before been published, this volume presents the full range of his prolific writing on the art and attitudes of his time, joining existing translations of his children's stories, poetry, and fiction to give new readers unprecedented access to his literary imagination. With an accessible introduction by Megan R. Luke and elegant English translations by Timothy Grundy, this book will prove an exceptional resource for artists, scholars, and enthusiasts of his art.

Arte Vetraria Muranese (AVEM) emerged from the liquidation of Successori Andrea Rioda in November 1931. The new factory placed a very personal accent on contemporary artistic glass production on Murano: while designs prior to the Second World War were generally still the responsibility of master glassblowers themselves, after the war designers and freelance artists increasingly determined production. Giulio Radi began experimenting in 1940, obtaining the company's signature chromatic effects by superimposing mould-blown layers of glass, often opaque and transparent in alternation, and inlaying them with gold and silver foil. This latest volume of Marc Heireman's ongoing Murano manufactory books features over 800 design drawings, numerous archive images and new photos of AVEM masterpieces, making this anthology of the company's history indispensable for all Murano glass lovers.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) lived art in the fast lane. With an appetite for glamour and fame as much as Left Bank bohemianism, she fled her native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and set about taking Paris by storm. Her prolific, monumental oeuvre remains one of the most vivid visual documents of 1920s Art Deco. De Lempicka's style deployed cool colors and tight post-cubist forms into an at once neoclassical and voluptuous figuration. Her subjects are often nude and always sensual, aloof, and powerful. Bedecked in seductive light and textures, they command our attention but typically avert their gaze with an aspect of haughty grandeur. They include both high-society patrons and progressive portraits of emancipated and lesbian women, such as Women Bathing and Portrait of Suzy Solidor. De Lempicka's notorious Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, meanwhile, was commissioned for the cover of German magazine Die Dame and became an icon of speed, sophistication, and female independence. Through some of de Lempicka's finest, most compelling portraits, this introduction explores the artist's unique visual language and its privileged place not only in the annals of interwar art but also in the history of female artists and our collective consciousness of the Roaring Twenties. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

This volume is the first publication to examine in detail the phenomenon of collective art practice in the continental Western Europe of the late 1950s and of the 1960s. The book elaborates a comparative perspective, engaging with a cultural history of art deeply concerned with political ideas and geopolitical conflicts. Groups of artists and activists including Equipo 57, Equipo Cronica, Equipo Realidad, N, GRAV, Spur, Geflecht and Kommune I, have often been neglected in the English-speaking world. This happened partly because they were active in allegedly minor art centres such as Valencia, Padua, Cordoba, West-Berlin and Munich. However, their works, debates and intellectual networks cast new light on both the art produced during the Cold War and the heightened interest in participatory and collaborative art practices that has characterised the art world of the 2000s and 2010s. Individuals against Individualism tells the stories of these artists and activists, and focuses on their attempts to depict and embody forms of egalitarianism opposing the Eastern bloc authoritarianism as much as the Free world's ethos. By setting their political use of collective authorship, resistance to institutional co-optation and attack on the 'ideology of freedom, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the book largely speaks to the present.

Burne Hogarth is one of the most famous artists in the history of comic strips - at the peak with Alex Raymond ("Flash Gordon") and Hal Foster ("Prince Valiant"). In 1936 he followed Foster on the massively popular Tarzan comic strip, and set a new standard for dynamics and excitement. This is the first of four exclusive volumes that will collect Hogarth's entire run, beginning with" Tarzan "and the "Golden City."
Restored and reproduced in an oversized format, these editions will finally do justice to one of the most lauded illustrators of all time, whose work has been out of print for more than a decade.
Details of illustrations:
Full-color restorations of the newspaper strips, reproduced in the oversized full-page format made popular by current collections of "Prince Valiant" and "Popeye the Sailor."
Details of extras:
Historical articles from Scott Tracy Griffin, author of "Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration"

American Modern presents a fresh look at The Museum of Modern Art's holdings of American art made between 1915 and 1950, and considers the cultural preoccupations of a rapidly changing American society in the first half of the 20th century. Organized thematically and featuring paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and film, the publication brings together some of the Museum's most celebrated masterworks, contextualizing them across mediums and amidst lesser-seen but revelatory works. The selection of works by artists such as Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Charles Burchfield and Stuart Davis include urban and rural landscapes, scenes of industry, still-life compositions and portraiture. Although varying in style and specifics, they share certain underlying visual and emotional tendencies. Cityscapes and factories are eerily emptied of the crush of residents that flocked to them, becoming both a celebration of clean modern form and technological advances, as in Sheeler's paintings and photographs, and a reflection of anxiety about increasingly urban life-styles and their consequences for the American individual, as in Hopper's iconic Night Windows. Equally silent rural scenes are no less haunting, but perhaps reflect a nostalgia for seemingly simpler times, and a celebration of early American traditions and values. Rather than an encyclopedic view of American art of the period, this volume is a focused look at the strengths and surprises of MoMA's collection in an area that has played a rich and major role in the institution's history.